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Because it IS wanted. Look at Steam. Look at Facebook. Look at all those achievement and social heavy games. All this was doing was cashing in on that wave. It just failed horribly at it and may or may not have chosen the wrong time/genre.

Also, I find it hilarious how it is horrifyingly bad for the people making games to have a vision/dictate what they want their games to be whereas it is perfectly okay for "gamers" to scream "No, that is not an online game even though it is online! IT IS WHAT I WANT IT TO BE!!"
But I think that goes back to what we discussed 10 or 12 pages back on how not all games are marketed to everyone. Many people refuse to acknowledge they aren't the target demographic for a game and insist they should be.

No they just have to do 1 of 2 things. Be honest or deliver the product. Neither were done here.

Art is art. But there is such a thing as "rubbish". Don't try to act like it's sophisticated "rubbish" when their "art" fails to load on the server, PC and the box art does not represent the product. I doubt that was their "vision". :P

I've said before I can't see how the extra resoltuion of information and the more fine-grained simulation (agents vs. model) actually impact gameplay meanignifully.

I've said what I would like to see with this agent-based system in these tiny space is "Theme City" where management is key.

Which seems to be needed. Fire trucks all go to the first fire that happens and ignore all other fires until that one is dealt with. Same with police. Same with garbage trucks, same with school buses. Because of this you get absurd situations where fire trucks conga-line about ginoring fires, garbage trucks scramble over a few wheelies bins whilst streets fill with rubbish.

Were this a management game. Were I able to set routes and if I had more management-style control rather than broad 'plopping' these problems (resulting from the limitations of the serial system of agent based modelling) could be dealt with.

Moreover, it would add meaningful gameplay that realted to the new simulation and information systems.

Also: The 'agents' (people, pollution, power etc etc) work serially. Human agents (people, police, firetrucks, garbage trucks, tourists) have no AI as such, in that no decisions are made. They just move towards the next goal. Residents leave their house, work in the nearest job and when leaving the job return to the nearest house.

In this repsects it's no different, and in no way a step-up from the "agent based" city sims that have been mentioned here. Moreover, a single-road city thus becomes incredibly efficient...

Does anyone use railways for inter-city transit? I'm curious... if I have a stop at either end, do I need to make sure that the track loops back on itself, or do the trains magically turnaround when they reach the end of the track (even if it's a dead end) before going back the other way?

Guild Wars 2:

Main character name is Seigous Bearheart. I also play on Duke Witherheart. And Lindenheart.

No they just have to do 1 of 2 things. Be honest or deliver the product. Neither were done here.

The only dishonesty I see here was that they claimed that the servers are handling all the calculations for gameplay. Casual inspection reveals that to be utter nonsense.

Gundato's right - we hail Kickstarter and indies as a new era for developers to make the games that they want to make, while people simultaneously tell Maxis that they can't make SimCity a social game because it's SimCity and we said so. People here honestly seem entirely unprepared to accept that Maxis may have (stupidly) decided to turn it into a multiplayer game first. It doesn't matter that the previous games in the series were all offline singleplayer, because Maxis appear to have made the choice to throw the game into the cloud because they thought it was a good idea.

Again I don't think it was a good idea and I agree that it didn't need to happen, but it's entirely their choice so the entire "This isn't SimCity because it's not my SimCity!" is utter nonsense if we're also prepared to accept indie devs making whatever game they want because it's their game which may not be of any interest to you.

Nalano's Law - As an online gaming discussion regarding restrictions grows longer, the probability of a post likening the topic to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea approaches one.
Soldant's Law - A person will happily suspend their moral values if they can express moral outrage by doing so.

People here honestly seem entirely unprepared to accept that Maxis may have (stupidly) decided to turn it into a multiplayer game first. It doesn't matter that the previous games in the series were all offline singleplayer, because Maxis appear to have made the choice to throw the game into the cloud because they thought it was a good idea

I'm not surprised when a developer blatantly ignores the reason a franchise is popular and applies stuff that goes against the very spirit of the game in the name of broader appeal, but I too still think it's stupid (the existence the Elder Scrolls MMO still blows my mind). Usually the best you can hope for is alienating the original fanbase and throwing yourself at the mercy of a fickle new crowd.

Now Enemy Unknown, that was a good game. The devs were clearly aware of why the series was popular and stayed true to that.

Does anyone use railways for inter-city transit? I'm curious... if I have a stop at either end, do I need to make sure that the track loops back on itself, or do the trains magically turnaround when they reach the end of the track (even if it's a dead end) before going back the other way?

I'm tempted to try this as a highway substitute, perhaps as a way to connect a residential area to a developed downtown. It might be viable in maps with rivers to cut down on the car and bus traffic that has to cross bridges. However, the price seems like it might be cost-prohibitive, what with the stations (costing 40k each), the track, and their maintenance.

I just want to say that anyone who thinks always on DRM is a small problem/justified is a complete retard. I'm not usually this straightforward, but being indifferent to such disgusting practices is what may kill the PC as gaming platform, or at least make it much, much worse. After this colossal fuck up (not just talking about the servers down) I will never again buy a EA game ever again or at least until I'm sure they will never release a always online game anytime soon.

Sim City CAN be a single player game with a offline mode. There is not justification WHATSOEVER for it being always online, other than being a piracy measure. What the Maxis rep said that it was "technically impossible" is absolute bullshit.

Apparently you can disconnect mid game and play normally for hours so none of the non social features use the servers. That alone is proof that it can be a single player game AND can be played offline as it only uses the server for authentication and for the said social features. Regardless of how much these add to the game they could still be in the game as a separate mode.

Nah. I'd say anyone who thinks always on DRM is a huge issue doesn't have any real problems in their lives, which I guess is good. Or, they don't have life outside gaming, which I guess is bad. Overreact much and all that.

Nah. I'd say anyone who thinks always on DRM is a huge issue doesn't have any real problems in their lives, which I guess is good. Or, they don't have life outside gaming, which I guess is bad. Overreact much and all that.

...says the guy whose town is spawning convoys of arsonists who try to burn down my city. *shakes fist at jnx*

To be honest I used to care about always online and never bought into it and that but to be honest I can't really care anymore Sim City was a game I got to play a demo of(BETA) that I really liked so I decided to put down money towards it because I thought I would get enjoyment out of it.

Also to say Online DRM is destroying the industry...no its a side effect the companies making the game, the consumers always buying one type of game and the balooning budgets making only that one single game type profatable I would say those are your culprits and should really try to go for that.

As I said earlier I do hope this actually becomes popular despite the problams of always online because it shows these type of games are profitable.

I really like the idea of the detailed simulation, but this is worrying :\ I was planning to buy the game whenever the first significant discount was available, assuming the server mess to be fixed by then. But this sounds as if the game ultimately will have no depth, since you'll always run into these problems. What's even more worrying is that this is something that has undeniably come up in QA testing and they apparently went with 'good enough'.

One of the worst things about this situation at the moment is the total lack of engagement on their answer forums. We're left with pretty much no clue what is going on, other than the snippets of information that appear in their sticked threads which contain next to no information, "We've installed more servers!" Great. Bit of a shame the game is broken even if you can log in.

A quick question. If I abandon a city and then reclaim will it restart it? Its an ok city, but running into problems, and I want to reset it now that I know a lot more about cities and needs. I can't just leave it as its a region with friends and sometimes the social things work and I am covering a couple of cities with power/fire brigade, also there are no few cities to move to in the region.

Basically, the population cap for your cities is 15k. Not 100k. In that the total number of people 'agents' glassbox can deal with is 15k.

As your city grows, the population number increases in exponential proportion to the number of resident agents actually in the game.

This extra popluation does nothing. They do not work, they do not consume, they do not pay taxes. They are merely an additional number ot bulk out the "total popluation" statistic. They do not exist in your city in any meaningful way.